About
I am currently a Software Developer and evangelist for Women in Tech. I live in Perth, Australia, although my roots lie as a kiwi from Palmerston North, New Zealand. I have worked at several prestigious companies in a variety of roles, such as Google, the University of Canterbury, Seven West Media, SheCodes and more.
I have had extensive experience in writing educational resources and teaching workshops about Computer Science and Programming for all ages and experience levels. My ability to describe technical details in a simple manner certainly sets me apart from others in my field and makes me an asset to any team.
Experience
She Codes is a startup, based in Perth, that is on a mission to teach women coding skills, get women into technical careers, and build communities of like-minded women. Their vision is to increase diversity in tech by inspiring 100,000 women across Australia by 2025.
Plus launched in Perth in 2019 and is a 5 month part time course designed to help women transition into tech careers. In 2019, as Lead Mentor, I taught the first three months of the course where the students learned HTML, CSS, Python and Django, and continued on in a support role for the second half of the course. In 2020 I am the Lead Mentor for all 5 months in Perth, and we are also running the course in Brisbane where I am Lead Mentor for the first 6 weeks. I am also the Content Developer and Coordinator for the course.
Flash is a 5 day program designed to give women a taster of several different areas of tech, including Web Development, Python, Flask, Data and Algorithms. I developed the content for each of these topics and was the lead mentor for the first Flash program in 2019.
https://shecodes.com.au/Firefly is a technology consulting company that focuses on developing and administering New Product Introduction (NPI) IT training programs for their client’s employees.
At Firely I am involved with designing and creating a program for educating software developers on how to use new software in the Financial Services Industry, which involves utilising my Python programming and content development skills.
https://www.fireflyeducate.com/This is a little passion project of mine. I am very interested in health and nutrition, as well as cooking. Have you noticed how recipe websites always seem to have someone’s life story before the recipe? I was pretty over these frustrating designs so decided to make my own instead.
In April 2020 I released version 2 of the site. Version 1 felt like a proof of concept, and was put together in Flask, JavaScript, HTML and SCSS. I decided to rebuild it using React and a headless CMS (Strapi) to make a clearer distinction between the front and back end. I also wanted to improve my React skills, and was in need of a more robust and component based frontend framework, so it was a perfect fit!
The Cut is digital agency focused on Python software development. I primarily work on backend development using Python and Django.
https://www.thecut.net.au/I worked as Web Developer as part of the Digital team at Seven West Media, where I helped to maintain and develop the websites for The West Australian, PerthNow and 7News.
I mostly worked with React, TypeScript and Emotion.
Fastvue helps businesses and schools deliver useful Internet usage reports to HR, Teachers and Department Managers. Their software interprets the messy logs from firewalls and turns it into something meaningful.
I worked with Fastvue as a User Experience researcher and conducted a UX study to identify opportunities where improvements could be made to the software interface. This involved conducting an in-depth assessment of the existing interface and interviewing existing clients about their experience with the software and presenting my findings in a report.
This is a website I made for a family member. Manawatu Building Recyclers is a house part recycling business in my home town of Palmerston North, NZ.
The website runs on a Node server (which is a little overkill but is there for the potential future addition of a contact form). Other than that it is simply HTML and SCSS.
This is a website I made for a family member who is a mentor for the PH@TT program, a program designed to help people develop healthy habits when it comes to food.
Healthy Living With Steph runs on a Node server to handle the contact form. Other than that it is simply HTML, JavaScript and SCSS.
Verto is an extension of the Python Markdown package, which allows authors to include complex HTML elements with simple text tags in their Markdown files. I was one of the main architects and maintainers of this package for several months.
Verto is an open source project so you can take a look at my contributions (and even contribute yourself) by checking out the repository on GitHub.
https://pypi.org/project/verto/
Computer Science Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. I was part of the team who rebuilt the website, moving away from an existing Wordpress site and into its own custom solution for delivering content and resources to teachers. The backend is written in Python using the Django framework. The front end is written in HTML, JavaScript and Bootstrap. The whole system runs on Docker containers.
CS Unplugged is an open source project so you can take a look at my contributions (and even contribute yourself!) by checking out the repository on GitHub.
The Computer Science Field Guide is an interactive textbook used in schools around the world to teach students about Computer Science concepts. I worked on this project part time for four and a half years. Most of my time was spent developing what are called “interactives.” These are little JavaScript applets that aim to teach Computer Science concepts by reinforcing the material in the chapter in a fun and engaging way. I also made considerable contributions as an editor and author to a number of chapters.
I worked on many of these interactives, but perhaps the most significant interactives I created were for the Computer Graphics chapter. The Box Translation and Rotation interactives demonstrate the basic principles of moving objects in 3D space. They are written using Three.js, a JavaScript framework for WebGL. The Arrow Manipulation interactives demonstrate how matrices can be used to manipulate shapes in 2D space, all written in JavaScript.
The CS Field Guide is an open source project so you can take a look at my contributions (and even contribute yourself) by checking out the repository on Github.
If you have ever enrolled at a University then you will know that it is not an easy task, and in fact once you’ve navigated your way through it you feel like you’ve already earned some kind of qualification. The University of Canterbury used to receive thousands of calls every year from prospective engineering students asking for help with their enrolment as it is a surprisingly complicated task given the number of requirements for each course (which is also affected by the type of qualification earned in high school), and the number of specialisations on offer.
I was asked to create a web page to help make this application process easier for new students. This has been embedded in the Engineering at UC website since 2016 and was a remarkable success that saves university enrolment and student help staff hours of work every year.
This project was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
In summer 2015/16 I was an intern on the Bandwidth Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) team at Google.To best describe what an SRE does, think about the last time Google went down, can you even think of a time Google was down? Probably not too many memories spring to mind, and that is because SREs are working around the clock to keep everything up and running, and to fix things when something does go wrong.
As an intern on Bandwidth SRE, another intern and I partnered to create an internal tool to be used by other SRE teams to check the status of the amount of bandwidth their service (e.g. Maps, Drive, YouTube, etc) in Google is using. The tool proved to be extremely useful and was already being used before they even finished the internship!
This was my first internship. I started at REANNZ only a week and a half after my last exam at high school, and it was a great way to spend the summer before starting university.
At REANNZ I worked on a data visualisation project, which involved creating a 3D representation of the REANNZ network by overlaying network data onto a model of New Zealand. This was done using Three.js, a JavaScript framework for WebGL, as well as some Python scripts for cleaning and sorting the data.
A screenshot of the finished project featured in this article:
https://www.computerworld.co.nz/article/568840/insight-enabling-nz-research-innovation-flourish/
The National Computer Science School runs a summer camp program, which I attended as a student in 2014 and 2015, an industry mentor in 2016, and a tutor in 2017 and 2018. NCSS is what made me realise that I wanted a career in Software! It is a 10 day event where students from all over Australia and New Zealand, as well as tutors from all over the world, come together to learn and experience Computer Science. It's just as nerdy as it sounds and is always an incredible experience!
For three years I worked part time with Gather Workshops as a presenter and mentor for their workshops. I was involved with delivering workshops on Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Robotics to students and teachers across New Zealand.